Worlds of wonder
Rarely do we identify wonderment as the organizing principle of major contemporary art events, but it is clearly the case with Richard Grayson's (The World May Be) Fantastic' Biennale, offering a welcome rejoinder to the earnest proclamations of its predecessor and avoiding the pretension to a hip international currency that detracted from Jonathan Watkins ' s otherwise similarly invigorating 'Everyday' Biennale of 1998.
There is a strong strand.if work running through this Biennale that sets out to capture little eruptions of transcendent magic which is concentrated within encounters with aggregations of objects, images and texts, marking elliptical passages of imagination across the surface of the social. The exhibition is riven with worlds within worlds, wunderkammer within wunderkammer, games within games, narratives within narratives, red-herrings, fakes, forgeries, puns, alter-egos, and Russian Doll subjects. Utopian models and systems act as another tributary of this art of the museological (or trade fair) 'display' that pervades the show. In fact the work of Vito Acconci, Kim Adams, Atelier van Lieshout, Chris Burden, Paul Etienne Lincoln, and Panamarenko in particular provides the Biennale with its backbone. Yet this is often difficult work to comprehend in gallery contexts, oscillating between documentation, instruction and stunning displays of material virtuosity in the models of Adams and Lincoln in particular. An array of cognitive encounters is demanded as the Biennale overall (thankfully) resists temptation to flattening out of all these wonderfully aberrant systems for living into a fundamentally aesthetic (or self-reflexive) art register.
Nevertheless, there is also a strand of work (again within this quasi-museological vein of accumulation and display) that is disappointingly underwhelming in its presentation here. These are intricate displays that clutter complex, multi-faceted fantasy worlds or... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline